Once again proving that axiom of the net — get popular and find a big target on your back, or servers as the case may be.

From the link:

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack.

The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m., according to TechCrunch. Later, Twitter posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.

In a denial-of-service attack, hackers typically direct a “botnet,” often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs, toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

Not only is social networking not private, for the most part you are ceding some, or all, of the rights to material you post to social networking websites. Once your material is on their servers, you’ve essentially given it away. Something to think about.

From the link:

A study conducted by the University of Cambridge discovered that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not immediately remove from its servers photos that have been deleted by users. The study audited 16 different social networking sites by uploading photos, noting their URLs, and then deleting them. Thirty days later researchers checked the URLs, and in the case of 7 sites, the photos had not been removed from content delivery networks.

Other sites were able to remove pictures immediately, and surprisingly, frequent security offender Microsoft was one of them: Windows Live Spaces had immediate removal of photos. Also on the ball were Orkut, Photobucket, and Flickr.